1. Field
This field is generally related to network routing.
2. Related Art
Network services may, for example, provide connectivity from a customer network to another computer network, such as the Internet. A network service may have particular service level agreement that guarantees certain service characteristics, such as bandwidth, latency, and jitter. Some customer networks have more than one network service that connects them to the Internet. Having multiple network services may provide redundancy.
To help select which network service to use, a network service may advertise routing information, using for example a protocol like Border Gate Protocol (BGP). Based on the routing information, routers on the customer network may know to route data to one network service over another. However, many conventional ways of advertising routing information lack configurability.
One way to provide configurability is to use policy-based routing (PBR). Policy-based routing (PBR) is a technique used to make routing decisions based on policies set by the network administrator. For example, when a router receives a packet it normally decides where to forward it based on the destination address in the packet, which is then used to look up an entry in a routing table. However, in some cases, there may be a need to forward the packet based on other criteria. For example, PBR provides a way for a network administrator to forward a packet based on the source address, instead of the destination address.
Being able to configure which network service to use to connect to the Internet may help guarantee a level of service for that traffic. For example, voice over IP (VoIP) traffic may require a shorter latency than other IP traffic. For that reason, a network administrator may want to direct VoIP traffic along one network service, while directing other IP traffic along another.